Asigra Decouples Backup and Recovery Pricing

Posted on July 10, 2013 By Pedro Hernandez

Asigra is setting out to change the economics of backup and recovery, potentially yielding big savings for organizations that are watching their enterprise data protection budgets explode as their storage requirements grow.

How? Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of Asigra, told InfoStor that his company is accomplishing this by "separating the backup license and the recovery license" of its software. This newly implemented, decoupled approach, called the Asigra Recovery License Model (RLM), hinges on a fixed price for backups and a variable cost structure for recoveries.

Farajun argues that traditional pricing models are somewhat of a black box. "You do backup to recover," he asserts. Assuming that an IT shop purchases backup and recovery from another vendor and it is priced at a 1:1 ratio, hypothetically speaking, most organizations are overpaying for the backup portion, the recovery portion or both, he said.

The reasoning behind RLM is that "nobody recovers 100 percent of their data," he added. Thus, RLM is his company's effort to bring fairness and transparency to enterprise data backup and recovery.

Backups are pegged at $0.0166 per gigabyte (GB) per month, lowering the cost of entry to the Asigra software platform and effectively capping what businesses pay to protect their data. As a bonus, IT managers can plan around predictable costs.

Recovery prices are based on a new metric, a Recovery Performance Score of 0 to 10, which is calculated every six months during the first year and every 12 months thereafter. The score is determined by data collected by the Asigra Recovery Tracker, the company's proprietary analytics tracking software tool.

Zero, the worst score, translates into the recovery of 25 percent of backup data and costs $0.50 per GB to recover. The best score (10) represents 5 percent of a backup and is priced at $0.167 per GB to recover.

Only successful recoveries count, and the single largest recovery event during a term is waived. "This allows customers who recover less to pay less," boasted the company in a statement. To sweeten the deal, customers "never pay more to recover more than 25 percent," added Farajun.

By Asigra's estimates, RLM will save organizations 40 percent on backup and recovery after the switch. Over time, the savings can settle in the 60 percent to 70 percent range.

Much like Amazon and iTunes revolutionized consumer goods and music sales, respectively, Asigra's strategy could have a big impact on the data backup and recovery market, according to Enterprise Strategy Group founding analyst Steve Duplessie.

"This 'Amazon Effect' is a business model shift that happens when a marketplace adopts a new approach to consumption. This is happening in IT and Asigra’s Recovery License Model is one such example that could cause an upheaval in the backup and recovery space," said Duplessie in company remarks.

Joining existing cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery support for Salesforce and IBM SmartCloud, is support for Google Apps. New Virtual Disaster Recovery features include incremental restores that employ changed block tracking (CBT) for faster failover and failback. For Microsoft shops, the software offers new single-pass backup and recovery capabilities for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013.

Asigra Cloud Backup 12.2 is available now.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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